In episode two of the new season of Girls, Hannah, played by Lena Dunham, attends a workshop in which classmates applaud a story by second-year African American student DeAugust. They love its spare language and how it addresses gender issues in an “almost offensive, but not offensive” way.

“I would cut off my arm to just read three more pages. I just have to know what happens,” one student gushes.

When Hannah gets around to reading her own story, it’s immediately lambasted. She’s accused of trivialising abuse and lacking sympathy for the male perspective. When she tries to defend herself, her teacher cuts her off and tells her to wait until everyone’s done critiquing.

The episode, which shows workshops as places where moaning comes ahead of critiquing and in which questions about gender are a minefield, made me grateful I’d chosen journalism school over an MFA program. In journalism, editors are the bottom line, ahead of wannabe writers. And teachers don’t cut you off.

Hannah’s first foray in MFA-land also brought to mind Chad Harbach’s MFA vs NYC n+1 essay about the pros and cons of graduate school in terms of making it as a New York writer.

In Girls, Hannah has left the New York hack scene behind and moved to the seemingly cosy atmosphere of graduate school. She’s a perfect fit for Harbach’s essay, since he focuses on rising enrolment in American MFA programs and wonders whether the industry can support the rising tide of writers.

Just what kind of writing does an MFA program hone, asks Harbach? Does it train a writer to improve, or just to write more acceptably in eyes of fellow wannabes?

Though Girls is not a mirror for everything in American society, Dunham does a solid job in showing how aspiring writers tend to respond to what they read based on personal bias and pre-established preferences. The critique of Hannah’s writing seems to have less to do with what she’s written than her background. Social class, perceived entitlement, gender and political correctness all play a part.

As viewers, we know how self-involved Hannah is, as well as how ambitious. In the past, her writing has leaned toward the shocking and subversive. She takes risks. She questions everything, which comes to the forefront at an MFA happy hour.

Tucked into a booth at a bar, Hannah confronts classmate Logan: “Woman to woman, you did not really think the piece was insensitive to sufferers of abuse?”

Logan replies: “That is how I perceived it.”

Hannah retorts: “But it’s just a story.” Logan condescendingly says: “Stories can be very powerful, Hannah.”

Hannah takes a sip of her beer, and says, “Oh my God, you’re a survivor of abuse.” Logan looks embarrassed since it’s obvious she is not, and is probably as “privileged” as Hannah.

These two scenes expose how creative writing workshops can seek out certain agendas, and are unwilling to take the writing process on merit. Hannah is at Iowa to become recognised as as a writer and a person. But her only hope, as a writer and possibly a person, is to believe in what she does without regard to social responses or conventions.

Girls says that a writer is a creature who must write, and who moves beyond both lack of interest by others and adulation, both of which are temporary. Writers are, of course, vulnerable to being sneered at, because their words are everything, and if those words are disliked, it can seem like a judgment on their essence. But it isn’t so. Hopefully, Hannah will remember her old editor, David, who died in season three, and her college writing professor, Powell, who both thought that said she could hack it. That’s better than a room of wannabe writers.